SPIN/MMB Working Lunch: Race, Secrecy, Mobilities

Despite the longstanding recognition of passing, for example, as a feature of the reproduction of race and racial injustice, the interconnections of race, secrecy and mobilities remains underexplored and undervalued in both migration studies and secrecy studies. For this reason, we are inviting interested colleagues to join us for lunch to explore the usefulness of thinking about race, secrecy and mobilities together.  We believe this could bring forth some new and exciting opportunities for current and future research projects.

Please join us in the Library Room of Royal Fort House on 19^th May at 1pm, for a working lunch. A hybrid option is also available.

To register please email Dr. Elspeth Van Veeren (SPAIS).

Further background to the subject:

Passing, the process by which an individual moves undetected through one culture or community into another, has a long history as a practice of survival. The term’s origins are most associated with the experience of African Americans escaping violence under slavery and in the Jim Crow era, most famously depicted in Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing. The ability to move freely is therefore unequally distributed along racial lines. More recently the term has expanded to describe a wider range of undetected movement such as by those queered in heteronormative and anti-trans spaces, or even of state spies operating covertly, Notably, ”passing’ is rarely used in what could be seen as one of the most prevalent current modes of passing: undocumented migrants passing as having legal status.

Passing as a practice sheds light on an important way in which secrecy, race, and mobilities are interconnected. It is also governed, overall, by wider cultures of secrecy. Beyond a view of secrecy as intentionally uneven access to information, secrecy is cultural in the ways it is accepted, legitimised, normalised, facilitated and distributed differently across identities, communities, societies, and times. It is therefore also racialised. In other words, the racialised borders and boundaries created to encourage or discourage flows are inflected, shaped, and experienced by and through secrecy and secrecy cultures, just as secrecy and secrecy cultures, are shaped through the (re)production of race.